Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Indie rock was extremely diverse, with subgenres that include indie pop and lo-fi among others. Originally used to describe record labels, the term became associated with the music they produced and was initially used interchangeably with alternative rock. As grunge and punk revival bands in the US, and then Britpop bands in the UK, broke into the mainstream in the 1990s, it came to be used to identify those acts that retained an outsider and underground perspective. In the 2000s, as a result of changes in the music industry and the growing importance of the Internet, a number of indie rock acts began to enjoy commercial success, leading to questions about its meaningfulness as a term.
In the mid-1980s, the term "indie" began to be used to describe the music produced on punk and post-punk labels. A number of prominent indie rock record labels were founded during the 1980s. During the 1990s, Grunge bands broke into the mainstream, and the term "alternative" lost its original counter-cultural meaning. The term "indie rock" became associated with the bands and genres that remained dedicated to their independent status. By the end of the 1990s indie rock developed a number of subgenres and related styles. Following indie pop these included lo-fi, noise pop, emo, sadcore, post-rock and math rock.[2] In the 2000s, changes in the music industry and in music technology enabled a new wave of indie rock bands to achieve mainstream success.
In the early 2000s, a new group of bands that played a stripped-down and back-to-basics version of guitar rock emerged into the mainstream. The commercial breakthrough from these scenes was led by four bands: The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives and The Vines. Emo also broke into mainstream culture in the early 2000s. By the end of the 2000s the proliferation of indie bands was being referred to as "indie landfill". Indietronica took off in the new millennium as digital technology developed, with acts including Broadcast from the UK, Justice from France, Lali Puna from Germany and The Postal Service, Ratatat, and BOBBY from the USA.